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Appian World 2013 Customer Case Study -- Five Helpful Tips on Getting Started with BPM

Cindy Cheng, ​Sr. Director of Marketing Communications, EMEA, Appian
April 30, 2013

Starting the journey in BPM could be exciting, challenging, daunting, or perhaps all of the above. A seasoned BPM professional and the Senior Director of BPM at PPD, John Verburgt, returned to Appian World for the 4th time as an attendee. This time, John shared his Appian BPM journey and Five Helpful Tips on Getting Started with BPM as a presenter.

John began the session by encouraging new BPM practitioners to be change agents and keep these attitudes in mind throughout the journey:

    • Leadthrough vision and find the Path

    • Keep your eye on the prize (the end results and business benefits)

    • Engage others early and often to make them participants in the process

Following an introduction on PPD, a leading global pharmaceutical contract research organization with operations in 46 countries and more than 12,5000 employees, John then shared five tips to help other BPM professionals be more successful:

    • Select your process case by defining the business problem, knowing return on investment (ROI) metrics, and defining the business scope and requirements within 90 days to make sure the project moves forward. He emphasized the importance of choosing and successfully implementing the first BPM project as afoundation to create additional applications.

    • Recruit your organization by identifying talents and cultivating great team dynamics, collaborating and reaching across functions, and promoting innovation efficiency to build a process organization. John talked about the importance of engaging with Appian Professional Services to get the help from seasoned experts in the beginning of an BPM journey.

    • Establish the platform by choosing a product that meets their needs, which places great emphasis on ease of use for both business users and technical specialists.

      • John also mentioned the importance of keeping it simple to one module or product that's encapsulated with all the key features that meet their requirements, including social, mobile, and cloud.

      • John's decision to deploy Appian on premise or cloud was pretty clear and simple. By going with cloud computing, John and his team were able to focus on the process, rather than the IT infrastructure, systems, maintenance, and upgrades.

    • Leverage Appian features by building modern worksocial applications with News to show what happened, Tasks to indicate what needs to happen, and Actions to empower users to make things happen. Rather than doing mobile development, John likes that he can check one checkbox in Appian to enable support for various mobile clients and web browsers.

    • Deliver and execute to build demand by planning for success and making sure that the team can scale to meet new business needs and handle multiple BPMprojects with best practices, effective tools, and methodologies.

Good luck with your BPM journey and we hope to hear your success story at Appian World 2014!

Cindy Cheng

Director of Product Marketing

Cindy Cheng